I have a question, the third question I ask here I think.
Simply, what about the countryside? How are farmers going to get postal service, health care, education etc? We have some schools here in Sweden with about 20-30 students, it’s not common to see schools with more than 500 students were I live, in the north.
I mean, still, we need the countryside, we need the farmers, and if they have to pay big money every month just to get some postal service and some education for their kids, wouldn’t that mean that the price for food would rise?
Don’t get me wrong, there might very well be a solution to all this, it’s just one thing that I wonder about.
Wouldn’t you rather the cost of producing food be reflected in the cost of food, rather than taken for some other purpose, and the redistributed to subsidize food?
Anarcho-capitalism, Austrianism are predicated on free markets, because they deliver the most accurate price information. With the best possible information, we can best order our purchases and preferences. Subsidization undermines accurate information, in the case of food, perhaps making it seem artifically cheap, leading to overinvestment, to waste, etc.
I don’t see the issue in your question, except you are wondering if people will swallow the costs directly. I mean to say, you don’t seem to argue that these support services could not be provided privately, only who will pay for it.
And that is our ideal scenario. We want people to pay for it directly, and thus create an incentive to farm most efficiently (perhaps the countryside is not the most efficient manner) or to improve on the provision of those overhead services (like roads, mail, health care etc). But if these overheads are subsidized, no one knows their “true costs” and thus, the effects of competition are deterred. Capitalists do not like uncertainty. They are less likely to invest in competitive enterprise unless they can estimate success.
Well, the state cannot turn off reality. If there is a problem with the provision of goods and services in sparsely populated regions, you already pay the price for it.
For example, there might indeed be a lack of infrastructure when it comes to energy in Sweden’s north. In a free market, farmers would’ve increased the price of their goods to make up for the higher cost of living. In the present, the state builds infrastructure for them with your tax money or subsidizes their products to even out this difference. It works the same way for every other need.
It’s just that in a free market, the price mechanism might lead to more productive uses of money than tax-funded state projects.
In general, however, potential decreases in standard of living to produce a good (also see mining, oil drilling) will lead to higher prices / wages. That’s how farmers would probably adapt.
Of course there are still sparsely populated areas with farmers. Half of my family lives in one (relatives on dad’s side, he grew up on a farm). Now they are not eremits or anything, but I don’t know if there are enough people for it to be profitable to have a road, school etc. and yes, the kids need to go to school, not to learn farming, but to learn reading, writing and math, for example. Maybe they don’t want to be farmers when they grow up? My dad didn’t wanted to, so he worked hard in school, went to university and became a medical doctor. I’m not trying to brag, I was just trying to explain why the countryside need schools.
But except of that, I think your explanation is pretty good. I’ve heard about some new technic where you grow things in skyscrapers and everything.
To be fair, the state isn’t only subsidizing the farmers. They are also nearly killing them with quotas and other kinds of bureaucracy. Maybe the farmers would make more - possibly enough to live on the countryside - if they didn’t have to deal with all that.
Sure, maybe the farmers can afford to hire tutors in a free market. Maybe their kids can go to school between planting season and the harvest and likewise.
Well, or they could study on distance? Like have their exams on the winter, when things are usually pretty calm at the countryside, and not during the harvest time or so.
What’s the big issue here? Farmers have to live like the rest of us, they offer a service the rest of us find beneficial. If it turns out that there’s disadvantages in this, such as lack of schools, then they’ll just have to deal with it and accept a higher profit to compensate for the disutiltiy of their labour. I very much doubt that the children of farmers need fromal schooling, basic literature and maths can be provided by the parents/ community. If the child doesn’t like that they can ask their parent to send them to school elsewhere or they can pursue a more thorough education in their spare time, very much like a lot of people do on these forums in regards to AE and libertarianism in general.
I don’t get the big deal make out of schooling, both libertarians and non libertarians. Many libertarians seem to assume that upon abolishing the state the dullest people will become Aristotles and Shakespeares. If a child has a special desire to learn than it is upon them, or their parents to pursue it, it shouldn’t be forced upon them.